


And Everywhere He is in Irons

by Val Mora (valmora)



Series: The Oviparan [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: A: a space case, Agoraphobia, Food Issues, M/M, Mpreg, Q: what do you call a helmsman without a helm?, Weight Issues, offscreen coerced sex, quadrant messes, teeth symbolism, trauma-induced preferences for very small spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-07
Updated: 2012-03-07
Packaged: 2017-11-01 15:11:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan cannot stop the <i>Valiancecution</i> from being decommissioned, but he can keep its Helmsman from the same fate.   The <i>Valiancecution</i>'s Helmsman adapts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Everywhere He is in Irons

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on the Homesmut KM [here](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/15949.html?thread=32195917#t32195917)
> 
> I don’t assume that trolls speak English, so when Eridan pulls out his accent, he is not literally doubling his v’s and w’s.
> 
> I am indebted entirely to Slipstream (@AO3) for the descriptions and implied social value of teeth and their quadrants in this fic; if you are curious, keep an eye, or a tongue if you’re so inclined, on her xenoanthropology fic [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/359990/) (in short: teeth are in quadrants, just like troll romance. Relative to the tooth-owner: Upper right = flushed, upper left = pale, lower right = black, lower left = ashen). The inconsistency of which teeth are stressed in this fic is deliberate, and in a troll cultural context would likely be troubling.
> 
> I owe the implied Helmsman network to VastDerp ([One of our Submarines](http://archiveofourown.org/works/341204/chapters/552441)).
> 
> The title is a more literal translation of part of the opening line of Rousseau's "The Social Contract."
> 
>  _The Ship Who Sang_ is a real book, part of a series by (human) Anne McCaffrey and one of the founding works of the "brainship" subgenre. 
> 
> MORI Ōgai was a Japanese writer and novelist.

The final schedule for his cycling for the next ten sweeps is - wrong. Three Helmsmen among the others on that list, and none of them the _Valiancecution_.

His handler, a pretty-enough jade-blood calling herself Gravidra who's been with him for nearly a hundred sweeps, is watching him over the edge of her tablet, her lips pressed flat.

"I've been cycled to the _Valiancecution_ at least once every five sweeps for," he waves a hand, "the last three hundred sweeps at least. Where is he?"

She glances down at the screen, then back up at him. "I don't know."

"I didn't ask just to hear my own voice," he snaps.

She fiddles with the tablet a bit, then shakes her head. "He's not listed as being destroyed in combat."

Eridan taps a finger on the surface of the desk, then says, "I'd like to find out."

She nods, turns, leaves his block. He presses his elbows into the surface of his husktop desk and buries his head against his upper arms, horns brushing against his wrists. His belly presses up against the edge of the desk, halfway through the cycle.

(Gamzee's protégée, who fights with ribbons to Gamzee's clubs. Eridan expects her to be dead in a couple of sweeps; it's what's happened every time he's been cycled to one of Gamzee's protégés, since Gamzee ascended to the position of Grand Highblood two hundred sweeps ago.)

He's cycled with Sollux more times than he has with anyone else. Almost a quarter of his cycles ― there was the century the Condesce wanted to expand the Fleet, calling for massive numbers of Helmsmen for Her battleships. By the end of it they were practically in a quadrant, and cycling to the chief Threshecutioner felt like cheating.

( _Fuck_ , Sollux had sworn, the first time Eridan returned, after four sweeps with others, _You're back again. Let me rehydrate in peace,_ but even after Sollux himself had finished, his psionic touch had curled between Eridan's legs until he, too, came.)

\---

"He's to be decommissioned in three sweeps," Gravidra says.

His hands feel empty, suddenly, so he pulls off one of his rings (the one with his own upper-left molar set into it; he'd had it made because his first handler had clearly wanted to be considered his moirail, and Eridan had taunted him by wearing it for most of a sweep before he killed him) and clenches his fist around it. "I want him."

Gravidra looks up at him, pityingly. "Your schedule doesn't allow for ―"

"The fuck it doesn't. You send me the records on the grubs same as all your predecessors have. I've been with, what, twenty helmsmen? Most of them in my first century. And I kept getting sent to him. I want him here, not broken down for water and protein where he can't fuck Helmsmen into me."

Her face goes soft. "I'll try," she says.

\---

Eridan's ship is small: three respiteblocks, a cookingblock, an ablution block, the engine room, the pilot's cabin. It's small, meant only to hop between ships in the fleet rather than conduct battle, so while it has a jack for a Helmsman's capsule, the computer has always been more than enough.

No one in a ship this size would _want_ a Helmsman. They're meant for battleships, for their self-defense capabilities and paranoia. Half the battleships in the Fleet have taken to overriding their computers' controls to shoot first, and inevitably it's because they knew without knowing that the other ship's officers were planning on attempting a coup ―

He chokes, dragging himself out of his recuperacoon (he's slow with a heavy brood of eggs, this sweep, and he's hoping they come early) and to his husktop, where he drags up the personnel files.

He has a list of all the grubs from all his cycles, kept by his handlers. It's not short. Neither is the list of currently serving Helmsmen, though it's certainly much shorter.

wwhats the ovverlap on these lists, he almost sends to Sollux, but he doesn't. Does it by hand.

At the end, he stops. Breathes. Drags one fingertip over the row of metal and bone at his knuckles, and glances out the porthole at the shining array of the Fleet.

More than half of those battleships are his and Sollux’s.

He drafts an email to Gravidra, attaches all three, and writes for the glory of alternia, the most perfect propaganda.

\---

He doesn't ask what Gravidra has to do to stay the decommission - the ship itself is a lost cause; it's nearly five hundred sweeps old, too old now for retrofitting - but after nearly a perigee away she returns to his ship with deep circles under her eyes and three missing incisors (ashen, black, black: a fight then, not a commitment, no jewelry of her own to show for it) and scabbed-over lines scraped over her face. But she says to him, "He'll be yours once they start cannibalizing the ship for parts."

\---

Drugged unconscious for transport, Sollux is like a badly-made doll, limbs disproportionate and his bones jutting out. No muscle at all, and no light behind his eyelids to show that he's alive, a Helmsman full in his power who can throw a battleship through space and do so much worse to a puddle-jumper like Eridan's ship.

Eridan plugs him back into the nutrient tube to his stomach, because Sollux hasn't eaten with his mouth since he got hitched to a ship, and has probably forgotten how.

++

He boots up. No. Not connecting. What's wrong with the ship's computer why isn't it interfacing where's the ship he can't feel it why where what's wrong this ship is wrong it's too small no computer where is

A jack slides into his thinkpan. Different computer. Smaller. Slower. A little civilian ship, small and stupid, no name for itself, no real weaponry. Meant to transport small numbers of people, outdated class, tiny, why _here_ , they don't need a Helmsman, where is his

Shipboard logs say _Oviparan_ all over. Eridan. Eridan violet all over curled soft above him called him by his grubhood name made him laugh.

Touch to his physical body. Disorienting. He focuses on it, feels with his psiioniics. Cold fingertips, rings on every one of them, broad enough shoulders, jagged horns.

"Eridan," he makes himself say.

"Yeah."

He remembers to breathe. The artificial gravity needs tweaking. He fixes it. "Why?" Why here, why you, why now, why not there.

"They were going to decommission you," Eridan says.

Decommission obsolete redundant useless dead. Not dead, demonstrably. (Can still hear the screaming, easy to block out now with the low-level murmuring of the shipboard computer.)

"I persuaded them to let me have you," Eridan adds.

Oh. Sexual slavery, then, what joy. Eridan did have the talent of bringing others down to his level, when he was young.

Better than dying? Maybe. Probably not. He doesn't know. The only sex he ever had after getting boxed up was with Eridan. That wasn't bad. Only once a sweep, if that. He used to store all the dates of Eridan's visits in a log in the computer, but it's gone now, with the _Valiancecution_.

"I've got some water," Eridan says. A drop of liquid falls on his lip. He licks it off, and the one after that. Cold and clear. He would shiver but he knows, intellectually, that he isn't cold. He warms up the gel in his capsule a little, though, with his psiioniics.

Eridan gives him water until he remembers to swallow, and then says, "I'll be back later."

Sollux doesn't respond. He skims all the ship's logs while he waits.

\---

Eridan makes him relearn how to drink water, how food tastes. What eating is. How to reach for things with his hands, instead of with his mind ― the first time Eridan made him try to take something, he did it with his psiioniics, and Eridan took it back. Held it. (He lost his hand-grip halfway through, but Eridan didn't seem to mind.)

The first time he manages to sit up, Eridan kisses his cheek, a press of cold against his skin. Eridan's belly is overfull, heavy, makes him slow. Because he's plugged into the computer, Sollux knows the stages of Eridan's cycles, knows all the people he's cycled with.

(Sometimes he curls his psiioniics around the bits of data that say _Helmsman of the SS Valiancecution_ and flips the charge back and forth again and again, leaving them as they were so as not to cause any trouble, and it's comforting.)

He's not sure how many perigees it takes for him to be able to walk across the block. It doesn't really matter, anyway. The brand at his wrist is still as vivid as it was the night it was burned into him.

\---

The ship is small, but compared to his capsule, it's enormous. Intellectually he knows that the _Valiancecution_ was the biggest ship of its class when it was built, but he never walked it, only saw it, ran through the cables of its nerves, and after a century knowing every single molecule of the wiring it seemed small.

He has his own recuperacoon, in his own block, separate from the helm and the pilot's controls where his capsule is. The recuperacoon is very small. It is comforting, sometimes, when the empty space of an entire block is too much.

He spends a lot of time closed up in his Helmsman's capsule, plugged into the ship's computer, sweeping up bits of data in the transmissions between ships, eavesdropping on the conversations. Eridan doesn't seem to mind.

\---

And then Eridan goes into cycle.

Obviously he's done it before ― Sollux has branded the date of the decommission of the _Valiancecution_ into every spare piece of computer memory the ship has, and it's been nearly four sweeps ― but Sollux had never noticed before. Maybe because he was still recovering? No, the last one syncs up to a particularly bad bout of agoraphobia that had ended with him losing a tenth of his body weight and throwing up on Gravidra the first time he tried to eat afterwards, and she'd plugged him back up to the nutrient feeder for three weeks while he spent his days horrifyingly awake and hallucinating that his third captain, the one who was only a hair off indigo and acted like it, was braiding his guts in with her hair as decorations.

And he'd known, three weeks ago, when they started out on their course towards the _SS Harbingeradication_ , that Eridan would be carrying out his duties there. But it's different now, tonight, when Eridan emerges from his block at ship-dusk wearing his full uniform of office: purple upon black, and jade green accents, for the relevance to grub-production. It makes his shoulders look very broad.

Breakfast is tense. Although Eridan puts a slice of toasted grubloaf on his nutrition plateau, he tears the whole thing to pieces rather than eating it, and his hands are shaking, ever so slightly.

The strawberry jam that morning smells good, unusually so - maybe it's new? - so Sollux dabs some on his grubloaf, takes a bite. It's not the jam. It's not the grubloaf. It's not -

It's _Eridan_ , he realizes when Eridan gets up to put the nutrition plateau away. Eridan who smells dark and sweet and is dressed for sex.

After Eridan and Gravidra depart, Sollux curls up in his recuperacoon, touching the walls with his fingertips. The sound of the aerator is reassuring, and when he curls his hand around his bulges he thinks of Eridan, throat long and gorgeous, shoulders and thorax gone violet with arousal, finding pleasure in Sollux buried inside him. It's not all fantasy. He already knows how to make Eridan's breath hitch, and where to drag his psiioniics to get Eridan to come. It's easy enough to go over it in his thoughts.

And then he remembers that he has the muscle tone to _actually_ touch Eridan, now. Could kiss him, could hold Eridan's bulge against his palm, press his lips and tongue to the wet ocean-bitter darkness of Eridan's nook.

(Has anyone ever done that for him? The way Eridan looked at him, the first time Sollux made sure he came, made him think not, or maybe it was because Sollux himself had never made sure before. He never asked, but now he wants to know for certain that it was only him.)

He falls asleep, after, curled up and comfortless with the knowledge that he can't have what he's just discovered he wants. Eridan belongs to the Empire. Not to Sollux, not even to himself.

\---

Sollux is in the cookingblock when Eridan returns, and Eridan smells _used_. Like whoever fucked him just smeared their genetic material over his skin and couldn't be bothered to care about him enough to even emit pheromones.

He very carefully sharpens his claws over the cookingblock table instead of slamming Eridan up against the wall and smearing his _own_ pheromones all over Eridan's neck, shoving Eridan's pants down to do the same to the insides of his thighs.

But Eridan looks too taken apart, wan and trembling, for Sollux to honestly entertain the idea. Even if it would be easy enough to push at Eridan in just the right way so that he would find himself in his annoyance.

(When Eridan retreats to his respiteblock, Sollux squashes the urge to follow him, to curl up around his body and hold him until he stops shaking.)

Gravidra sits down at the cookingblock table and sighs, then gets up and pulls a bottle of wodka out of the thermal hull, pours herself four claws' worth.

"You want some?" she asks.

"No. Thanks."

\---

Eridan stays in his respiteblock for three nights, emerges smelling horribly of soap and disinfectant and thank god not sex.

(Sollux has spent the past two days tracing every inch of Eridan's skin with lips and tongue in his dreams.)

"Better?" Gravidra asks him, and Eridan shrugs, pulling out a packet of raw vat fish from the thermal hull.

"Stopped oozing pheromones," he says, and sits down, tearing a chunk out of the fish with his teeth (upper left Sollux suddenly wants to knock a few out make a row of them to curl into his own throat).

Gravidra fiddles with her tablet. "She was new, right?"

"Yeah."

"Should check with the blood reader in a couple of nights.”

Eridan flicks a claw against the table and swallows a mouthful of fish without chewing.

“Oviparan,” Gravidra says, warningly.

Eridan swallows another bite, throat flexing. “I been doin’ this longer’n you’vve been _alivve_ , greenie,” he drawls, voice like the splash of waves against stone.

“Yes,” Gravidra says, “but you will not do it longer than I will be alive if you stop being useful.”

Eridan shrugs, backing down, and finishes his fish.

\---

Eridan gets, gradually, heavier and heavier, slow and easily irritated. His ship follows in the wake of other ships in the Fleet. Sollux spends hours lying in his open capsule, listening to the ships’ chatter (after sweeps of flirting, the _Targeminal_ and the _Tekkolkhoz_ are finally officially pale; the lines between the ships of the Fleet are nearly incandescent with the gossip oinkbeast-backing on normal communications), but either Eridan or Gravidra comes by right before ship-dawn to make sure he disconnects.

He sleeps poorly, eats enough that his weight continues to drift towards something approximating normal, keeps his gaze inside the ship because looking out at the stars triggers his agoraphobia.

\---

He misses the egg-laying. Eridan leaves the ship in the middle of ship-day, when Sollux is asleep, and doesn’t return until near dawn two nights later. His abdomen is nearly flat, his skin grey, and he smells like salt and blood.

Sollux helps Gravidra hold him up to get to his respiteblock from the airlock.

“Eight eggs,” Gravidra says approvingly to Sollux, right as they reach the door to Eridan’s respiteblock.

“Is that a lot?”

She flashes her left upper canine in a smile directed entirely at Sollux. “Not everyone he cycles with can give him ten. Five is the usual.”

“ _Ten?_ ”

Eridan’s gills snap in warning, audible even through his clothing. “ _Recuperacoon_ , before I cull you for incompetence.”

Gravidra rolls her ganderbulbs and goes inside the respiteblock. Sollux stays at the door, even after it slides shut in front of him.

It takes a little while before Gravidra emerges, looking a little overworked herself, and Sollux repeats, “Ten?”

She half-smiles, touches his left cheek. It feels over-familiar, but he doesn’t stop her. “With you.”

The shame of it makes his bile sac clench. He’s always wanted to hurt Eridan, but not like that. Not in the way that makes him feeble and weak and close on breaking.

“I see,” he says.

\---

Eridan is mostly better by the end of the following perigee, though sometimes when he sits or stands too fast he winces and touches his belly. It reminds Sollux of – things. He wants to bury his hands elbow-deep in Eridan’s guts and tear out his egg sacs, watch him bleed and scream and tremble, then fix him up so that Eridan never smells like _just-sex_ ever fucking again.

He doesn’t, of course. He knows who he owes his life to, and what supports it.

(Should have known should have _known_ the way Gravidra looks at him all the jades he’s ever seen were grub-obsessed Gravidra is waiting to breed them like always it’s probably why he’s alive at all)

He listens to the static crackle of the transmissions between the _Targeminal_ and the _Tekkolkhoz_ , not bothering to unscramble the signals.

\---

For Twelfth Perigee, Gravidra gives him a copy of a trashy Troll Mori Ōgai romance, the latest in the _Ship who Sang_ series. It’s the most tasteless thing he’s ever received.

Eridan gives him a wireless interface for his Helmsman’s jack, so that he can be plugged in and still be mobile in the ship. He doesn’t ask where Eridan got it, nor how much it cost: for all his position, Eridan’s blood is still violet-dark, and his stipend matches.

Sollux doesn’t have a gift as such for either of them: he recalibrated the ship’s engines and improved some of the computer systems. Easy enough, not even terribly time-consuming. Stripped-down versions of improvements he made to the _Valiancecution_.

The meal is nothing particularly special, but Gravidra got a bottle of galvados from somewhere, probably someone running an unauthorized side trade in one of the food-production ships, and they drink half of it during the course of the evening.

Gravidra goes to her recuperacoon while he and Eridan are still talking, and once she’s gone Eridan picks up the data maggot of the _Ship_ novel.

“You gonna read this?”

Sollux sets down his drink. “It’d fuck me up even worse.”

“Thought so.” Eridan drops it on the floor, crushes it under his boot heel. It leaves a little lime-green smear of blood against the flooring. “You okay with -” He gestures to the box of the wireless jack.

Sollux doesn’t look away from the clean metal of it, feeling the empty itch in the back of his brainpan. “I’ll let you know.”

\---

He tries it out. It’s nice. He can sit in the pilot’s seat while he works instead of having to stay in his capsule, and that keeps him anchored, keeps him from losing track of himself.

One morning Sollux is checking the hull monitors, idly listening in on Fleet chatter, when Eridan leans a hip up against the chair, arms crossed. He’s dressed casually, a blank t-shirt and a pair of dark-violet trousers, no blood sign anywhere to be seen, and he says, “Any good gossip?”

Nothing that Sollux would betray to someone who’d never been locked in a helm. He turns off the jack.

“The Enculturmoilers are plotting something,” he says instead, because it’s true.

“How d’you know that?”

Sollux shrugs. “Lots of non-essential hull maintenance.”

Eridan huffs out a breath. “Oughta repurpose yourself for the Intelligensalvagers.”

Sollux stands up. “I don’t mind it here.”

“Course you don’t. I’ m here.”

“You’re not all that good.”

Eridan folds easily into the kiss, his hands coming to rest on Sollux’s waist, thumbs tucking under the hem of Sollux’s shirt, and his lips are cool against Sollux’s own.

\---

The sex is easy, natural. Gravidra seems about as surprised to walk in on them fucking in the pilot’s seat as she would be by the revelation that Eridan’s a seadweller.

Sollux wouldn’t have thought that Eridan would be touch-starved, but he is. They both are. Spend hours tangled up together, sometimes not even for sex: once, remarkably, twisted up painfully close in Sollux’s Helmsman’s capsule, hemmed in close. Eridan strokes at the back of his neck, just under the jack, Sollux’s lips pressed closed to Eridan’s shoulder.

He picks fights with Eridan just to see him go pitch with frustration, and Eridan does the same; sometimes they gouge out pieces of each other’s bodies on the same night as they bandage each other up. They fuck like they can’t get enough and kiss like they want to devour each other, and curl up together like grubs in between.

One evening he wakes up earlier than Eridan, and, restless, goes to the cooking block for some coffee. Gravidra is reading on her tablet, and when he depresses the button on the grubloaf-slice-heating-machine, she says, lips pursed, “His cycling schedule is paramount.”

“Because I’m so eager to cycle with him.” He uses his psiioniics to open one of the cabinets and floats a beverage container to his hand, then fills it with water.

“It’s a reminder,” she says. “The rest I don’t care about.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll leave him empty so someone else can use him.” He drinks the water, abandoning the grubloaf, and crawls back into the recuperacoon with Eridan, pressing his thorax to Eridan’s back.

\---

He is unsurprised when Gravidra presents Eridan with a revised cycling schedule that includes the line _Helmsman of the SS Valiancecution (Dec.)_ for some three sweeps from now. What surprises him is that it did not come earlier.

\---

Eridan’s cycle hits unexpectedly early, almost a week before his scheduled appointment with an Archeradicator of high standing and particularly porphyric connections.

Sollux can smell it on him, and it’s made even more appealing by Eridan already being covered in a mix of black-red-pale pheromones from the both of them. He wants to bury himself in Eridan’s skin, jack into Eridan’s nerves, know him inside and out. Hurt and heal all at once, and he’s not allowed to.

The appointment is rescheduled, and for the first time since he left the _Valiancecution_ he jacks in properly, psiioniics filling every plane and cranny of the ship, and he makes it hurtle through space like he was hatched to.

Once they arrive, he unplugs, shoves his arm in a container of nutritive slime, and watches Eridan watch Gravidra negotiate boarding protocols. Eridan wears the uniform like armor, and with the arm not absorbing nutrients Sollux pulls him close. Bites at his throat too hard for kindness, kisses his foodflap too softly for hate.

“Come back to me,” he says, and Eridan makes a soft noise, not quite laughing, too light for a sob.

“Does either of us have anywhere else to go?”

“There’s always out there.” Sollux nods his head out at the open expanse of the stars, but darts his gaze away before it can make him crave the safely enclosed space of his Helmsman’s capsule.

“Not even there,” Eridan says, and nips at the inside of Sollux’s wrist, at the edge of the hot iron-red of the Condesce’s mark, unfaded even after all his sweeps.


End file.
